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Friday, September 30, 2016

Victorious Corbyn consigns Blairism to history

This is a fascinating and honest assessment of the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Labor Party and it is by a conservative journalist. The slander and assault Corbyn has weathered has completely backfired as the LP has become the largest party in Western Europe by accounts.

There is a lesson here for us in the US. Not only Corbyn's rise, but also the rise and fall of Syriza in Greece. Syriza received a mandate from the Greek working class to stand against the austerity agenda of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF, known widely as the Troika only to have the leadership of the party shamefully capitulate 48 hours later.

Here in the US we have the two most unpopular candidates in history according to the mass media.

We have an ignorant representative of the capitalist class on the one hand who is basically a land speculator, racist and misogynist, and a sharp, conscious and brutal representative of US capitalism on the other who will continue the Bush/Obama foreign policy with gusto. We have an unprecedented situation with right wing Republicans supporting the Democratic Candidate. The US bourgeois could well be left with one party after this is over or, we will see a major alignment in politics.

We have pointed out on this blog that the Green Party can emerge from this campaign stronger than it has ever been as Sanders supporters have moved in to it after his betrayal. A significant showing would be a victory for the Greens and would also alter the balance of class forces in the US. Unlike the British Labor Party, the Green Party has no base in the trade unions and is strongly and very negatively influenced by the petty bourgeois; it does not orient to organized labor at all in the main and has a very undemocratic internal life. We have urged socialists in the Green Party to build an open and active left caucus/current within it. The GPUS recently adopted an eco-socialist plank but neither its presidential or VP candidate mentions it. Some of us from this blog attended the Green Party Convention in Houston in August. Here are the three points we suggested the left or a functioning left caucus take up. This article is reprinted from Middle East Eye

Goodbye New Labour: Victorious Corbyn consigns Blairism to history

By
routing his opponents and breaking the neoliberal consensus, Corbyn has
the strongest mandate of any opposition leader since Tony Blair

According to the British media class, the last week has been an unmitigated disaster for Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Don’t believe a word of it.

According
to the received version of events, Jeremy Corbyn leads a split party,
has zero chance of winning the next election, and is driven by a
demented political ideology which will take Britain back to the worst
days of the 1970s.

As a Tory, I don't share many of Corbyn's
political beliefs, but I am certain that most of what is written about
the Labour leader is false.

He has not simply defeated
his opponents. He has routed them. He therefore has the strongest
mandate of any opposition leader since Tony Blair in 1994

The
truth is that Corbyn has had an outstanding week which has vindicated
everything he has ever done and said as a man and a politician – a point
that the Labour leader drove home in his superb leader’s speech from
Liverpool this afternoon.

The achievement is colossal, and Corbyn
is still growing into his job. This week has won a massive endorsement
from Labour Party members – and on a scale which would leave most
politicians open mouthed with envy.

More significant still, it is the second endorsement he has secured from Labour Party members in just 12 months.

This
means that Corbyn is now unchallengeable as Labour leader. He has not
simply defeated his opponents. He has routed them. He therefore has the
strongest mandate of any opposition leader since Tony Blair in 1994.

The hard way
Unlike
Tony Blair, Corbyn has to do it the hard way. He has achieved his
triumph in the face of hostility from a deeply unfair and partisan
British media, much of which is openly determined to destroy him and
distort his actions.

He has been forced to pay a very high price for challenging conventional opinion.

I've
been a political journalist for nearly 25 years and there is no
question that Jeremy Corbyn should be celebrated for ushering in this
new kind of politics

But in the space of barely a
year, he has reinvented Labour as a political party, taking Labour Party
membership from 200,000 in the wake of the 2015 election, to more than
500,000 today.

He has done this by reinventing public discourse
itself. He has abandoned the discredited politics of spin and
manipulation associated both with Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair’s New
Labour and David Cameron’s Tories. Corbyn is not by any means a great
orator, but he speaks in the simple, intelligible language of ordinary
people.

I've been a political journalist for nearly 25 years and
there is no question that Jeremy Corbyn should be celebrated for
ushering in this new kind of politics.

Breaking the old model
As
he explicitly set out in his hugely important speech this afternoon,
Corbyn has broken from the consensus politics of the last quarter of a
century. From the rise of Tony Blair in 1994 until the general election
of 2015, there was – to use Corbyn’s potent phrase from Liverpool today –
a "political stitch up" between the main political parties.

There
was an unspoken agreement between Tories and Labour that they would
only work within very constrained parameters. The Cameron Conservative
Party and the Blairite Labour Party both advocated near identical
spending and taxation targets. They both supported the marketisation of
the public sector. They both agreed the same neoliberal economic model.

In
foreign policy terms, both main parties accepted British subordination
to the United States of America, and therefore a neoconservative
doctrine of armed intervention in order to advance the interests of the
West in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Nobody can claim that these
twin doctrines - neoliberalism at home and neoconservatism abroad -
were successful. They led to debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, as
well as the banking crash of 2008. But anyone who challenged these two
orthodoxies was politically marginalised.

This afternoon, Corbyn
became the first leader of a mainstream political party to directly
challenge this paradigm, with his assertion that "the old model is
broken and we’re in a new era". Corbyn deserves almost unlimited credit
for offering an alternative.Support, leave - or conspire?
Corbyn's
triumph does, however, create a real difficulty for his many opponents
inside the Labour parliamentary party. They have been overwhelmingly
defeated not just once, but twice.

It is time that they
acknowledged that they have been beaten. There are two honourable ways
that they can do this. They must either come out and support Jeremy
Corbyn as he tries to implement the settled, democratic will of the
Labour Party. That means taking front bench jobs and supporting the
leadership as it sets out its distinctive vision for the future of
Britain or - at the very least - supporting Corbyn loyally from the
back-benches.

Alternatively, they should leave the party
altogether. This would be a painful course of action - but entirely
honourable. The Blairites are completely at liberty to set up their own
political organisation, just as Shirley Williams and David Owen set up
the Social Democratic Party in despair of what they saw as the far-left
wing taking over the Labour Party in the 1980s. They can then test their
popularity with the electorate.

The Blairites are
completely at liberty to set up their own political organisation, just
as Shirley Williams and David Owen set up the Social Democratic Party

The
third course of action is to continue to behave as they have over the
last 12 months, and to carry on conspiring against and undermining
Corbyn. That would be deeply dishonourable and wrong, but on past
performance entirely in character.

There are some intriguing
parallels between the disloyalty of Blairite Labour MPs towards Corbyn
and the attitude of the Egyptian deep state towards President Mohamed
Morsi after he was elected president in free democratic elections in
2012.

The Egyptian Army and intelligence services, the business
elite and the Nasserite left simply refused to recognise the legitimacy
of multiple elections and would not enable Morsi to govern. They had
their way, but the democratic transition was set back years in the
process.

So far, that has been the approach of Hilary Benn, Tom
Watson, Ben Bradshaw and the other Labour wreckers and saboteurs. They
are refusing to accept that Corbyn has a democratic mandate and, as a
result, are determined to destroy him from within.

Corbyn has
earned his chance. He proved with his fine speech this afternoon that he
has a vision. Labour MPs should now give him his chance to prove that
he can reshape a new kind of British politics. God knows that it is
badly needed. Even as a Tory, for the health of the British political
system, I wish him all the luck in the world.

- Peter Oborne was
named freelance writer of the year 2016 by the Online Media Awards for
his reporting for Middle East Eye. With MEE colleague Nawal Al-Maghafi,
he is among the few correspondents to have ventured into war-torn Yemen
in recent months.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo: Opposition
Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks on the fourth day of the
annual Labour Party conference in Liverpool, north west England on 28
September 2016 (AFP)